Work starts on Joka-Esplanade Metro’s Park Street station
Times of India | 2 August 2024
Kolkata: RVNL has started construction of the Purple line’s Park Street Metro station with the casting of the diaphragm wall.
Railways officials said Kolkata should get its second Metro station at Park Street in the next two or three years. The Purple line, which will eventually cover 14km from Joka to Esplanade, is currently operational across an elevated 8km stretch from Joka to Majerhat.The 5km underground work started last year with the construction of Victoria metro station.
While construction of the Victoria station and the launching shaft of tunnel-boring machines (TBMs) inside St Thomas’ Boys School is underway, implementing agency Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL) has now started construction of the Park Street station which will have a passenger interface with the existing one of the North-South corridor or the Blue line.
“Work for the Purple line’s Park Street station has started with the diaphragm or D-wall casting, for which extensive excavation was undertaken. The D-wall isolates the under-construction structure from the surrounding soil and ground water,” a railways engineer told TOI.
The station will be 325m long and 24m wide. The last 500m of Joka-Esplanade Metro — or Line 3 — will be constructed in cut-and-cover method because a crossover from rakes to change tracks will be built at Esplanade. “TBMs can only burrow and build in linear fashion. Therefore, the last leg will be built in the cut-and-cover method. The Park Street station is also being built in a similar way. Therefore, the last leg of the construction effectively begins at this point,” the engineer said.
RVNL will have to transplant 184 trees that will be felled on Maidan opposite the existing Park Street metro station. The forest department has approved the transplantation and 55 trees so far have been transplanted from Maidan to Kamardanga near Beliaghata. The D-wall casting for the Metro station is on at the site where Kolkata Police Club was earlier located. The club has now been relocated to a nearby spot in a container provided by L&T, which has been contracted to build the Rs 2,447crore underground Mominpore-Esplanade section.
The existing Park Street station, one of the 26 stations of the North-South or Kolkata’s Line 1, was launched in 1984 when India’s first underground Metro became operational from Esplanade to Bhowanipur (now Netaji Bhavan). “It will be interesting to have another underground metro station coming up at the iconic Park Street four decades later,” said Barnali Das, who works at Asiatic Society.